A Handbook of Qualitative Methodologies for Mass Communication Research

MEDIA CONTENTS

5 The interdisciplinary study of news as discourse 108 Teun A.van Dijk 5 The interdisciplinary study of news as discourse 108 Teun A.van Dijk

6 Textual analysis of fictional media content 121 Peter Larsen

MEDIA AUDIENCES

7 Reception analysis: mass communication as the social production of meaning

135 Klaus Bruhn Jensen

8 Communication and context: ethnographic perspectives on the media audience

149 David Morley and Roger Silverstone

MEDIA CONTEXTS

9 Qualitative research and community media 163 Nicholas W.Jankowski

10 Historical approaches to communication studies 175 Michael Schudson

Part III Pragmatics

191 THEORY DEVELOPMENT

11 Studying events in their natural settings 193 Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang

SOCIAL CONTEXTS AND USES OF RESEARCH

12 Media, education, and communities 216 Michael Green

References 232 Index of names

260 Index of subjects

Tables

32

1.1 The roles of language in qualitative methodologies

2.1 Data collection and information types: methods of obtaining information

60

7.1 The journalists’ news stories 142

7.2 The viewers’ news stories: two examples 144

7.3 The super themes of news reception 144

Contributors

Teun A.van Dijk is Professor of Discourse Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. After early work in poetics, text linguistics, and the psychology of text processing, his recent work focuses on the social psychology of discourse, especially news discourse and the reproduction of racism through discourse. He is the author of several volumes in each of these domains, and is current editor of TEXT and founding editor of the new journal Discourse and Society .

Michael Green is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies (formerly Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies), University of Birmingham, UK. He has written extensively on media, cultural policy, and education (for example, Unpopular Education from CCCS); he also works actively with media teachers at different educational levels and with an arts and media center.

Nicholas W.Jankowski is Associate Professor at the Institute of Mass Communication, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Author of Community Television in Amsterdam, he has been conducting qualitative research of small-scale media since 1975. He is also involved in the study of cable television services and is research director of the Centre for Telematics Research in Amsterdam.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, TV, and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of Making Sense of the News and of many articles on reception analysis, qualitative methodology, and news. During 1988–9 he was a Fellow of the American Council of Klaus Bruhn Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, TV, and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of Making Sense of the News and of many articles on reception analysis, qualitative methodology, and news. During 1988–9 he was a Fellow of the American Council of

Learned Societies affiliated with the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California, USA.

Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang are sociologists on the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, where both of them are Professors. Previous joint publications include Collective Dynamics (1961), The Battle for Public Opinion (1983), and most recently Etched in Memory: the Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation (1990). The American Association for Public Opinion Research honored them with its award for a lifetime of exceptionally distinguished achievement in the field.

Peter Larsen is Professor in the Department of Mass Communication, University of Bergen, Norway. He is the editor of the recent UNESCO study, Import/Export: International Flow of Television Fiction, and has written extensively on mass communication research and semiotics.

David Morley is Lecturer in Communications at Goldsmith’s College, London University, UK. He is the author of The Nationwide Audience and Family Television and of numerous articles on qualitative audience research, cultural theory, and other aspects of mass communication research.

Horace M.Newcomb is Professor of Communication in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas in Austin, USA. He is the author of TV: the Most Popular Art, editor of Television: the Critical View (now in its fourth edition), co- author, with Robert S.Alley, of The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with America’s Leading Television Producers, and has written extensively on television and other aspects of mass communication.

Michael Schudson is Professor in the Departments of Communication and Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He is the author of Discovering the News: a Social History of American Newspapers and other works, including as co- editor, with Chandra Mukerji, of the forthcoming Rethinking Popular Culture .

Contributors xi

Roger Silverstone is Director of the Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture, and Technology, and Reader in Sociology, both positions at Brunel University, London, UK. He is the author of The Message of Television and other works on various aspects of mass media, and is currently preparing a new volume, Television and Everyday Life .

Gaye Tuchman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA. She is the author of Making News: a Study in the Construction of Reality and many articles about news. Her most recent book is Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change .

Fred Wester is Associate Professor of Research Methodology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is the author of several books and articles on interpretive sociology and qualitative research methods. A recent work of which he is co-author, Qualitative Analysis in Practice, examines uses of the computer in qualitative research.

Preface

The publication of this Handbook marks the culmination of several professional and personal itineraries. The chapters of the volume suggest that the field of mass communication research has been undergoing two interrelated developments in recent decades: the rise of qualitative approaches as methodologies with an explanatory value in their own right, and the convergence of humanistic and social- scientific disciplines around this “qualitative turn.” As editors, we offer the Handbook as a resource for the further development and social use of qualitative methodologies in different cultural and institutional contexts.

The personal itineraries have taken one editor from Europe to the United States, the other from the United States to Europe, and both to India, where the idea for the Handbook was first conceived during the 1986 meeting of the International Association for Mass Communication Research. As participants in this conference, we were reminded repeatedly that while qualitative research represented an important (and frequently the most inspiring) part of the scholarship presented at that and similar events, there were as yet hardly any journals, conference sessions, or handbooks available which could serve to institutionalize this area of inquiry and to introduce students and young researchers to its methodologies. The cultural setting of the 1986 conference also contributed to our awareness that for the study of communication in its varied social and cultural contexts to become valid or meaningful, methods of qualitative and “thick” description (Geertz, 1973) are required.

We had carried with us to India the education and professional training of two distinctive traditions, Klaus Bruhn Jensen representing the humanities and Nick Jankowski the social sciences. Moreover, while Klaus has at different times studied and done research in the We had carried with us to India the education and professional training of two distinctive traditions, Klaus Bruhn Jensen representing the humanities and Nick Jankowski the social sciences. Moreover, while Klaus has at different times studied and done research in the

USA, he remains rooted in the cultural and research traditions of Europe. Conversely, Nick, having been trained in the USA, has migrated permanently to Europe. Thus, the editing of the Handbook has been an experience in convergence in practice with the constant but constructive discussions that this involves; we hope to convey both the potentials and pitfalls of convergence to readers in the pages to follow.

Convergence implies cooperation, but not necessarily equal contributions. Klaus has been the prime mover in developing the ideas and principles on which the Handbook is premised, establishing the contacts with a series of distinguished scholars in the field, and working with these contributors to shape an integrated handbook which would

be representative of, and relevant for, current research. In matters of coordination and detailed editing, Nick has been an equal partner in the enterprise.

Acknowledgements are due to a number of people for their commentaries on draft chapters and other assistance in the process of putting together the volume. Nick is grateful to Marjan de Bruin, John Hochheimer, Ed Hollander, and Fred Wester; Klaus wishes to thank Hans Arndt, Peter Dahlgren, Torben Kragh Grodal, Erik Arne Hansen, Søren Kjørup, and, last but foremost, Grethe Skylv. Finally, we acknowledge the contributions of the other authors and their readiness to participate in the exploration of a relatively new territory in the field. The responsibility for any limitations and shortcomings in this articulation of the qualitative turn, of course, is ours.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen Nicholas W.Jankowski Copenhagen, Denmark

Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Introduction: the qualitative turn

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

Recent years have witnessed a significantly increased interest internationally in applying qualitative research methods to the study of social and cultural processes. The turn to qualitative approaches has perhaps been especially prominent in mass communication research. Particularly during the last decade, there have appeared a number of major qualitative studies of the institutions, contents, and audiences of mass media. In the words of James Carey, the field thus has entered into “a process of making large claims from small matters: studying particular rituals, poems, plays, conversations, songs, dances, theories, and myths and gingerly reaching out to the full relations within a culture or a total way of life” (Carey, 1989:64). The present volume, through surveying the state of the art of qualitative science as well as examining its theoretical and political implications, aims to take stock of the qualitative turn in mass communication research. Further, the Handbook is offered as a resource for the further development and application of qualitative research in the field.

Two different sets of historical circumstances have interacted to produce the qualitative turn. First, the growth in qualitative approaches is a product of factors internally in the scientific community. Many scholars and institutions have come to question the explanatory power of conventional empirical approaches within the social sciences. There appears to be an emerging consensus that a great many central research issues cannot be adequately examined through the kinds of questions that are posed by hypothetico-deductive methods and addressed with quantifiable answers. At the same time, research traditions within the humanities, anthropology, and cultural studies have been seen to offer alternative or supplementary modes of analysis. Currently, as a result,

2 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

the social and human sciences may be converging in an interdisciplinary rearticulation of mass communication research. One textbook which surveys key studies of media from the social sciences notes the rise of a “meaning paradigm” (Lowery and DeFleur, 1988:455–9), even though the authors do not venture outside social science in a narrow sense to consider some milestone works which might serve to specify and explain the meaning paradigm. In retrospect, it is hardly surprising that mass communication, being at once a social and a discursive phenomenon, has challenged various social-scientific and textual disciplines in the field to rethink their theoretical and methodological categories.

Second, the qualitative turn is the product of factors of social history that are external to science. If one accepts the lesson of history that scientific developments are, to a degree, interdependent with changes in the broader socioeconomic context, then qualitative approaches may be seen as a scientific means of coping with a new form of social reality, what has variously been called the postindustrial society, the postmodern age, and the information society. The erosion of traditional social patterns and the rise of mass communication as a primary source of social cohesion in many regions of the world are twentieth-century trends which have accelerated over the last few decades, prompting a search for new theories and methods to comprehend social and cultural complexity and change (Jensen, forthcoming). Fragmentation of the social setting is being met with integrative, contextual modes of understanding in theory and methodology.

Whereas a detailed analysis of the interdependencies between contemporary society and qualitative science remains to be written by the history of science, the first two chapters below begin to document the varied backgrounds of current qualitative media studies. The purpose is to place mass communication research in the wider framework of research focusing on the role of human language, consciousness, and cultural practice in everyday and social life. The emphasis that is given to language and experience as constitutive elements of social practices and institutions is, indeed, a common denominator for different traditions of qualitative analysis. A related focus is found in the so-called linguistic turn of twentieth-century philosophy (Rorty, 1967), which has taken everyday language as its point of access to inquiries into the structure of reality and the conditions of knowledge. Symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, further, have noted the importance of everyday

Introduction: the qualitative turn 3

conceptual categories for social analysis, and semiotics, as developed in linguistics, literary theory, and other fields, has proposed to study manifold social phenomena as signs with reference to their uses in cultural, political, and religious practices. Each tradition of inquiry, in different ways, can be said to explore the stuff that social reality is made of.

DEFINING “QUALITATIVE”

Even while humanistic and social-scientific approaches to mass communication may be converging around the qualitative turn, it is still too early in the process to suggest a characterization of what a genuinely interdisciplinary field might look like. The present handbook argues for the need, as a first step, to develop common terminologies and to rearticulate research issues across what remain great divides of discipline and methodology.

The qualitative tradition in mass communication research may have been relatively slow in developing its contributions to the field in the form of journals, conferences, textbooks, and handbooks, at least compared to mainstream quantitative work. This has been due, in part, to factors of social history, as already noted: the dominant social construction of reality for a long time has remained quantitative, not least among the sociopolitical agents and institutions that confer legitimacy and funding on science, thus creating a structural bias against qualitative studies. The culture of science and politics in the twentieth century, for most practical purposes, has been quantitative (see the argument in Snow, 1964). However, as institutional and social structures become more amenable to qualitative perspectives, it is crucial to specify what different qualitative methodologies can offer and claim.

This volume, accordingly, in Chapters 1 and 2 presents both some points of contact and some fundamental theoretical and empirical differences between the two main contributors to qualitative media studies—the humanities and the social sciences. By way of introduction, it is useful to establish a few preliminary signposts locating the qualitative enterprise in relation to the field as a whole. In addition to anticipating the emphases and arguments of later chapters,

a brief account of the issues and premises at stake may also help to prepare a dialogue across the field of mass communication research about the explanatory value of qualitative methodologies.

4 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

Modes of inquiry

One may begin to explore the respective contributions of qualitative and quantitative methodology by looking at the forms of knowledge that are normally associated with each. The background to the two modes of inquiry lies respectively in the humanities and the natural sciences, or, in the classic German terms, Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften . Culture and communication, accordingly, may

be conceived of as a source of either meaning, in phenomenological and contextual terms, or information, in the sense of discrete items transporting significance through mass media. As a result, qualitative analysis focuses on the occurrence of its analytical objects in a particular context, as opposed to the recurrence of formally similar elements in different contexts. (However, as Chapter 1 notes, structural forms of analysis such as semiotics may combine the two perspectives by establishing recurring deep structures beneath the heterogeneous elements which occur at the surface level.) This implies either an internal approach to understanding culture, interpreting and perhaps immersing one-self in its concrete expressions, or an external approach that seeks to establish a detached stance outside of culture. Similarly, media contents and other cultural forms may be seen to give rise to a relatively unique, indivisible experience through exegesis or, alternatively, to a set of stimuli which can be manipulated through experiment, thus producing variable effects that can be measured. Finally, where quantitative analysis would focus on the concrete, delimited products of the media’s meaning production, qualitative approaches examine meaning production as a process which is contextualized and inextricably integrated with wider social and cultural practices. The following columns sum up the two perspectives normally associated with qualitative and quantitative methodology.

QUALITATIVE QUANTITATIVE

Geisteswissenschaften Naturwissenschaften meaning

information internal

experience experiment exegesis

measurement process

product

Introduction: the qualitative turn 5

It should be added that the dichotomies of the columns refer, above all, to the self-conception of the analytical traditions. As Chapter 2 explains in more detail, the social sciences, after an early qualitative phase, increasingly came to see the natural sciences as offering a standard of social inquiry. This is in spite of the fact that natural scientists may not see the social-scientific appropriation as very much akin to their standard, and indeed may perceive their work as more comparable, in several respects, to qualitative modes of inquiry. Partly in response to this development, the humanities have come to emphasize their unique, aesthetic, and historical perspectives on reality, thus also contributing to dichotomization. Today, the two elements of the dichotomies coexist uneasily in a number of scientific disciplines and fields within both the social sciences and humanities. Whereas a unified science of communication may be neither possible nor desirable, certainly in the short term, it appears worthwhile to explore the complementarity of the different analytical traditions. The purposes, ends, means, and objects of analysis are hardly incompatible in an absolute sense; the question is to what extent and in what terms qualitative and quantitative modes of inquiry are compatible.

Levels of analysis

At present, then, there seems to be no way around the quantitative- qualitative distinction. Although it sometimes serves to confuse rather than clarify research issues, the distinction is a fact of research practice which has major epistemological and political implications that no scholar can afford to ignore. It is necessary, first of all, to specify the analytical levels at which the distinction may apply. One may distinguish four such levels:

the object of analysis (as identified and characterized through reference to the purpose and context of the inquiry); the analytical apparatus or methods (the concrete operations of inquiry, including the collecting, registering and categorizing of data); the methodology (the overall design of the inquiry which serves to relate the constituent methods of data gathering and data analysis, further justifying their selection and the interpretation of the data with reference to the theoretical frameworks employed);

6 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

theoretical framework(s) (the configuration of concepts which specifies the epistemological status of the other levels, and which hence assigns explanatory value to the specific rendition of the object of analysis that the methodology produces).

As summed up by Anderson and Meyer (1988:292), “it is method that generates the facts that become evidence within theory.”

Even though these four levels are in practice interdependent, it will be suggested here that, in principle, the labels of “quantitative” and “qualitative” apply to methodologies and, by implication, to the methods which constitute specific methodologies. Being the juncture between the concrete acts and tools of analysis (methods) and the overarching frames of interpretation (theory), a methodology represents a heuristics, or a mode of inquiry.

The relevance of a specific methodology depends, above all, on the particular purpose and area of inquiry (for arguments to that effect, see Lang and Lang, 1985, and Jensen and Rosengren, 1990). Too often in communication studies it appears that the methodological choices have been made long before the issues and ends of inquiry have been posed, so that the methodologies become solutions in search of problems. One of the reasons why the use of qualitative methodologies in empirical studies is still relatively limited may be in fact that these methodologies are not considered as a concrete option, in part because students (and their professors) are still taught to regard survey and experimental designs as the standards of systematic science. Yet, the last few decades have produced systematic and professional conceptions of qualitative research, of which the present handbook presents a “representative” sample. Indeed, for purposes of theory development as well as applications of media studies, it is crucial that researchers assess the relevance of different methodologies with reference to the purposes and objects of analysis, asking what and why before asking how.

Two further specifications of the levels of analysis are called for. First, no object of analysis is by nature quantitative or qualitative, but is framed thus by the medium or analytical apparatus employed. For the sake of this opening argument, one could say that while the medium of quantitative analysis is numbers and their (numerical) correlations, the medium of qualitative analysis is human language expressing the concepts of everyday experience as they pertain to a specific context.

Introduction: the qualitative turn 7

The relevance of each medium, to repeat, depends on the purpose and area of inquiry.

Second, the qualitative-quantitative distinction in a narrow sense loses its relevance at the level of theoretical frameworks, even if qualitative and quantitative traditions tend to emphasize different types of theory. It is in the nature of the matter that theory is qualitative, insofar as it represents a configuration of interrelated concepts. At the theoretical level, geology and statistics are as qualitative enterprises as art criticism. This is in spite of the fact that much theory lends itself to formalization and numerical or graphic representation. Indeed, many, perhaps most, new insights rely on qualitative procedures, serving to relate the different levels of analysis, as witnessed also by examples from natural science. In the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn (1970:182–4) thus refers to what he calls “symbolic generalizations”—the (qualitative) rearticulations of key terms in a field which may open the field to new forms of empirical and mathematical analysis. More generally, various forms of qualitative analysis acquire general explanatory value, despite their “non-representative” empirical samples, because, as part of the analytical procedures, continuous cross-reference is made between the theoretical and other levels of analysis.

This last point is sometimes missed in accounts of the foundations of communication theory, which tend to mistake analytical efficiency at the methodological level for explanatory value at the theoretical level, hence discounting qualitative analysis. One example is the handbook of Berger and Chaffee (1987), which aims to set standards for a comprehensive “communication science.” While recognizing that “neither quantitative nor qualitative data have much meaning…in the absence of well-articulated theory,” the authors nevertheless repeatedly imply, in their introductory sections and own chapters, that general or predictive theory is premised on the quantitative measurement of the covariation of variables or operationally defined constructs, rather than what they continue to call “unspecified qualitative techniques” (Berger and Chaffee, 1987:18). The one chapter in their handbook that draws on the humanities, in an almost deferential discourse, presents these contributions to the study of communication as “nonscientific” (Farrell, 1987:123).

Furthermore, Berger and Chaffee (1987:144–5) pass over the fundamental theoretical problems that arise when “communication

8 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

science” seeks to transform the level of (verbal, visual, and other) discourse to the level of empirical, numerical analysis, asserting that this “is not inherently problematic.” What qualitative and humanistic researchers have been demonstrating for some time now, is that such a decontextualization of discursive meanings is precisely a key problem for the study of human communication. One may recall here the well- documented argument of Beniger (1988:199) that, ironically, mainstream communication research, at least in the USA, may be the one field currently paying little attention to “theories of information, knowledge structures, communication, and the encoding and decoding of meaning.” This situation calls for more genuinely exploratory, theoretical as well as empirical work which would acknowledge the relevance and contributions of both qualitative and quantitative traditions.

In sum, the qualitative-quantitative distinction will be taken here to apply to methodologies—the structured sets of procedures and instruments by which empirical phenomena of mass communication are registered, documented, and interpreted. The different methodologies give rise to distinctive modes of understanding media and to specific applications of the findings in contexts of media production, education, and policy. The applications and implications of qualitative media studies are taken up in Part III, while Part II surveys qualitative approaches to different stages and aspects of mass communication processes. Before turning in Part I to the legacies that have shaped current qualitative research, a brief outline of the whole Handbook is in order.

OUTLINE

Part I is devoted to history: the roots of qualitative mass communication studies in previous research within a number of scientific fields. Chapter 1 presents the legacy of the arts and humanities, which traditionally have centered on the interpretation and appreciation of texts, particularly literary and other aesthetic production. More recent work has examined texts in the perspective of their social uses, defining culture in anthropological terms as a set of communicative practices constituting a whole way of life. The chapter examines the special contributions of semiotics and cultural studies to current qualitative media research, and it points to a number of challenges to the further advancement of the field, among them poststructuralist theory and research on visual communication. One important methodological

Introduction: the qualitative turn 9

contribution of the humanities has been the development of discourse analysis, which offers a systematic, qualitative alternative to formal content analysis. Discourse analysis also suggests ways of integrating the social and discursive aspects of meaning production within a theoretical framework of social semiotics.

Chapter 2 surveys the qualitative tradition in the social sciences, from its prominent status in early sociology and anthropology through the predominance of quantitative methodology in the first few decades following World War II, to the return of qualitative studies since the 1960s. The survey identifies the heterogeneous origins of qualitative analysis in the social sciences, and considers, among other things, the contributions of community studies and action research to the area. During the last decade in particular, methodological advances in the form of new, systematic research techniques have contributed to the standing and usefulness of qualitative social science. Several of these developments have occurred within communications, and they have entailed theory development as well as important empirical findings regarding the role of media in the lives of individuals, communities, and whole cultures.

The eight chapters of Part II make up a systematics of mass communication research, examining in turn studies of the different stages of the communication process. Though some qualitative work has questioned the Lasswellian (1948) model of communication, most of the chapters do focus on either the institutions, the content genres, or the audiences of mass communication. This is, in part, because most previous research tends to assume this model, but also because the field has not so far produced a comprehensive alternative, which would take its point of departure outside the communication process itself, for example, in the media’s context of social institutions and cultural practices. However, two of the chapters on systematics review studies which have served to place the media in the context of the community and of modern history. Also other chapters note that the area of inquiry includes not just the mass media as such, but, crucially, mass communication and popular culture as social practices. While there are some references to “media” research, the perspective which emerges also from Part II, emphasizes a holistic approach to “mass communication” as a social practice and cultural process in specific contexts.

Part III concludes the Handbook by addressing the pragmatics of qualitative research: its implications for theory development, for the

10 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

politics of communication, and for further work in the field. Chapter

11 lays out what may be considered a logic of qualitative analysis with reference to the authors’ own classic contributions to mass communication research, discussing the specifically qualitative research process and its relevance for theory development. Chapter

12 turns to the conclusions that may be drawn from qualitative research in the context of education and politics, outlining the possible uses of research in developing media literacy curricula and in evaluating the media’s service to the audience-public. The indexes and the brief sections introducing each of the three parts, finally, have been designed to increase the accessibility and applicability of the volume for different groups of readers.

The Handbook is offered as a resource to several groups of readers. First of all, it can work as a textbook for students in undergraduate and graduate courses in mass communication, particularly on theory and methodology. It may also, it is anticipated, encourage more departments and teachers to include the qualitative dimension in the curriculum. Moreover, the Handbook represents a new reference work for researchers, practitioners, and educators in media. Increasingly, as mass communication research turns qualitative in order to comprehend new media environments (Jensen, forthcoming), scholars need to master the theory and tools of qualitative work. By the same token, practicing professionals and planners in media need qualitative evidence in order to understand how the media operate and to improve research and development. Media educators also will be able to draw on the qualitative research summed up here to develop curricula on media literacy, which are currently being included at various educational levels in many countries.

Qualitative methodology may be an especially important ingredient of education and research which addresses mass communication in different cultural contexts (Lull, 1988a). Complementing traditional research designs, which normally articulate a characteristically Western rationality, qualitative studies can contribute to the development of international research on mass media in their cultural, contextual specificity. The Handbook itself includes some perspectives, if admittedly a limited selection, outside of Anglo-American research. As mass communication increasingly becomes an agent of social cohesion and cultural interchange in a transnational perspective, qualitative methodologies may be developed further to make sense of the international media environment.

Introduction: the qualitative turn 11

The title of the Handbook has been chosen to suggest the preliminary nature of qualitative methodology and, indeed, of the whole field of mass communication research: it is a handbook of qualitative methodologies. Like their objects of analysis, qualitative methodologies are in the process of being made. Qualitative studies, in conclusion, represent one contribution to the theoretical, methodological, and empirical development of an interdisciplinary field of mass communication research. Most of the studies and debates which may construct the field are still ahead of us.

Part I

History

The first part of the Handbook lays out some main lines of the “history” of qualitative approaches—their origins in various scientific disciplines and analytical traditions. Whereas qualitative methodologies are sometimes perceived as recent innovations and additions to the toolbox of mass communication research, Chapters 1 and 2 document the long history of qualitative modes of inquiry in both of the main traditions which inform contemporary communication studies.

The humanities, as examined in Chapter 1, represent centuries of textual and interpretive scholarship. While a mainstream of this research originally tended to emphasize the contemplative understanding and appreciation of particularly literary masterpieces and other high-cultural forms, recent work has included popular culture and everyday practices in the area of inquiry, studying the social and cultural uses of texts, images, and other signs. Culture, following Raymond Williams, increasingly has come to be defined as a whole way of life. One important contribution of the humanities to the study of mass communication has been the development of theory and of a theoretical reflexivity which may enable the field to conceive of forms of communication and culture that go beyond the familiar institutions and practices of industrial capitalism and modernity as focused on by the social sciences. A further, methodological contribution of the humanities tradition comes from its development of systematic approaches to the study of language and discourse, which constitute the primary categories and media of qualitative research.

Chapter 2 shows that qualitative modes of inquiry also had a prominent status in early social-scientific research. During the first decades following World War II, when the mainstream of the social

14 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

sciences turned quantitative, qualitative research remained an undercurrent, which re-emerged and gained new momentum from the 1960s. This development had several heterogeneous origins across the social sciences. Theoretical frameworks and methods were derived from symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and ethnography as practiced in anthropology and sociology. Like the humanities, these approaches emphasized the importance of everyday language and consciousness in orienting social action. Further, some studies were informed by a critical knowledge-interest as in, for instance, action research giving priority to the social applications of new knowledge. One key contribution of qualitative social science to mass communication research has been its explicit and detailed articulation of methodology, specifying the research process as a sequence of procedural steps which makes possible intersubjective agreement— and disagreement—on findings.

The two chapters on history suggest at least two areas of convergence—one theoretical, the other methodological. Theoretical convergence is manifest around a notion of language as action. Both the humanistic and social-scientific traditions of qualitative research emphasize that the conceptual categories of everyday language lend orientation to most forms of social action and interaction—what represents, in the aggregate, the social construction of reality. Language is a means of meaningful action, as suggested by speechact theory (Chapter 1), as well as a mediator of various types of interaction from daily conversation to political and cultural activity. The social semiotics outlined in Chapter 1 offers a theoretical framework for further specifying the relationship between mass media, everyday language, and social action.

Methodological convergence, further, is occurring in the development of systematic approaches to the analysis of qualitative data. Whereas Chapter 2 situates the analysis of data within the research process as a whole, Chapter 1 presents discourse analysis as a specific method for strengthening what remain weak links of the qualitative research process: analysis, interpretation, and documentation. Later chapters also contain analysis and discussion of mass communication as a discursive practice (see especially Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12).

All chapters include a large number of references to previous research, including basic textbooks that may complement this Handbook. Further, the Handbook may work well in combination with

History 15

collections of materials which address particular media in their cultural context. As general reference works which cover aspects of the history of qualitative research on mass media, we add here Keywords (Williams, 1983b), the Handbook of Communication Science (Berger and Chaffee, 1987) which is also discussed in “Introduction: the qualitative turn,” and the International Encyclopedia of Communications (Barnouw et al., 1989).

Chapter 1

Humanistic scholarship as qualitative science: contributions to mass communication research

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

INTRODUCTION

For more than 2,500 years, the humanities have been studying, in the contemporary terminology, the texts of interpersonal and mass communication. Traditionally, however, humanistic studies of literary works and other major cultural forms have not emphasized the analysis of culture as communicative practices. Studies, instead, have been said to perform an exegesis, or reading, of cultural tradition, poetic genius, the Zeitgeist, or an ideology which found its expression in texts. The changes in concepts and terminology are significant, because, as Raymond Williams has shown, the “keywords” of a culture at different historical times imply particular conceptions both of social reality and of the purpose of scholarship about this reality (Williams, 1983b). Whereas scholars differ on the precise origins of the humanities, it may be argued that a distinctively humanistic tradition, drawing on centuries of historical and textual scholarship, began to emerge in the early nineteenth century, and that, further, the humanities assumed their current shape when “social science” was spawned as a separate area of inquiry around the beginning of this century. If the origin of the concept of communication is associated with modernity and the rise of Lockean individualism (Peters, 1989), it is only within the last century that communication and information have become keywords across the humanities and social sciences. In the humanities in particular, the qualitative turn has been a communicative turn. This past century, then, may be thought of as the century of the sign, spanning the rise of mass communication on an unprecedented scale

18 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

as well as, partly as a response to this (for want of a better term) megatrend (Naisbitt, 1982), the rise of semiotics and other communication theory to explicate an opaque social reality requiring interpretation.

The present chapter traces some main lines of this complex social and scientific development from the perspective of humanistic scholarship. After introducing a common definition of communication as the social production of meaning, I present a survey of major analytical traditions, with special reference to historical studies of literacy, semiotics, and contemporary cultural studies. The chapter further considers a number of current challenges from postmodernist and feminist theories of language. A section on methodology notes a gradual shift from textual, aesthetic appreciation to the systematic analysis of specific cultural forms, particularly with the development of discourse analysis. Perhaps the key contribution of the humanities to qualitative research is an emphatic commitment to studying the language of particular texts and genres in their historical setting. The dark side of this literate bias is a certain blindness to non-alphabetic modes of communication, not least today’s visual forms of communication, which are addressed in a separate section. In conclusion, I discuss the outline of a social semiotics which, while drawing on the categories of humanistic theory and discourse analysis, would approach mass communication as a cultural practice, in which issues of power, identity, and social structure are negotiated.

Communication as meaning production

To say that the mass media produce and circulate meanings in society is a more controversial statement than it may seem. Different disciplines and theoretical schools tend to define and apply the concept of meaning-its origination, interpretation, and impact-in distinctive ways. Not only must one distinguish, from a social-scientific perspective, between the definition of meaning production as a social ritual and as a transmission of contents from producers to audiences (Carey, 1989:15). From a humanistic perspective, the contents must

be conceptualized as the expression of a particular subjectivity and aesthetics, and as the representation of a particular context. These several aspects of meaning production may be specified with reference to three basic constituents of the communicative process which are shared by most contemporary humanistic as well as social-scientific

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models of communication: the message of communication, the communicators, and the embedding social structure; or—in a humanistic terminology—discourse, subjectivity, and context.

The concept of discourse, first, is a legacy of the textual scholarship that has been characteristic of most Western philosophy, theology, and other humanistic research. The underlying assumption is that language is the primary medium of interchange between humans and reality (in processes of perception, cognition, and action), and that, accordingly, verbal texts may become vehicles of knowledge and truth. Whereas traditionally this assumption applied to religious, scholarly, and literary texts, today much qualitative work employs the concept of discourse to refer to any use of language, or other semiotic systems, in social context. Crucially, discourse now is said to include everyday interaction and its categories of consciousness, thus constituting the medium of the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Through language, reality becomes social. Equally, it is through language that reality becomes intersubjective and accessible for analysis. Hence, for the purpose of qualitative research language and other semiotic systems represent both an analytical object and a central tool of analysis.

Subjectivity, similarly, has come to be defined in terms of language. In contrast to a philosophy of consciousness conceiving of subjects as relatively autonomous agents that exercise moral and aesthetic judgment, recent theories of language and subjectivity have described the subject as a position in language (for a survey, see Coward and Ellis, 1977). Such a position, while negotiable, tends to imply a particular perspective on the world and on one’s own identity and place in the world. In Althusser’s (1971) terms, the subject is interpellated or hailed to occupy particular positions. The mass media, of course, are among the main sources of interpellation in the modern period. Moreover, the positioning of subjects in language implies their excommunication from certain other positions—the unconscious. According to Lacan’s (1977) reformulation of Freud, it is this process of positioning which serves to structure also the unconscious as a language. In terms of the present argument, mass communication can

be said to give voice to some discursive positions while silencing others. Finally, humanistic communication theory has approached the social structure in which mass communication is embedded as literally

a con-text—a configuration of texts that must be “read” or interpreted,

20 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

and which is the outcome of a process of historical change. This approach is in keeping with the traditional understanding of history as being, at one level, a set of stories about the past. Changing the analytical focus from specific stories as told by particular bards, to the deep structure or system of stories which dominates a given society or culture (Foucault, 1972), contemporary studies have suggested how media and other agents of socialization serve to inscribe individuals in the culture. Such stories lend a sense of purpose to the social practices in which individuals and institutions engage, pervading everyday consciousness and action.

Discourse, in sum, is the common object of humanistic inquiry. Yet, the conception of discourse has varied both in different historical periods and between humanistic disciplines. Furthermore, one conspicuous absence in much work has been the lack of an explicit examination of the impact of discourse with reference to particular subjects in their specific social context. The following section offers

a survey of some main tenets of previous humanistic research; the survey further considers the extent to which each research tradition has examined culture as a set of communicative practices. Whereas a chapter of this nature cannot give more than a reductive sketch of what is an ancient and heterogeneous field, special attention is given to contributions from literary criticism and cultural studies, with some reference to history and psychology. The humanities, from the beginning, have been an interdisciplinary field.

HUMANISTIC TRADITIONS From literacy to literary criticism

Whereas, in oral cultures, bardic poetry traditionally serves as the memory of the culture and its vehicle of education, Greek culture particularly from the fifth century BC came to depend, in part, on alphabetic writing for these purposes (see the survey in Thomas, 1989). Plato’s attack on the poets may be taken as indicative of a gradual transition to literate culture (Havelock, 1963): poets should no longer

be trusted in social matters such as politics or the writing of history, even if their poetry could still be appreciated as personal opinion or myth. In sciences, alphabetic writing may ensure a systematic and cumulative analysis. In politics, the manageable set of distinct letters makes possible a social and governmental system of significant

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complexity by offering a resource for organization and debate across time and space.